GLASGOW — Elizabeth Hunter “never thought I was pretty enough, smart enough, or witty enough.” Still, the 41-year-old mother of two young children earned two college degrees, one in electrical engineering and another in computer engineering.

But she spends her days in a crowded, 10 by 15 concrete room with a metal toilet and three other women, one of whom sleeps on a mat on the concrete floor. Just outside, other women sleep in metal bunks — or on the floor.

During the day, she works as a “pooper scooper” for the local animal shelter — “I take care of the puppies and clean the place up” — and hopes she can regain custody of her children, an eight-year-old daughter living with her paternal grandparents in Atlanta and a two-year-old son living with his paternal grandparents in Glasgow.

See, Hunter is in jail — a convicted state felon serving five years for forging checks and stealing money from her church.

She’s a binge drinker, an alcoholic who stole to pay for the booze. She costs taxpayers about $11,000 a year. Still, that’s about half what it costs to incarcerate felons in state prisons.

“I know I’m a convicted felon and I know I’ve done something I deserve punishment for,” Hunter said from the Barren County Detention Center.

She’s eligible for parole this month, and if she doesn’t win parole, she’ll get out next September, counting one day’s credit against her sentence for every 40 hours she’s worked at the animal shelter.

She’s fearful she hasn’t conquered her alcoholism. She’s tried to get into substance abuse programs, but those are reserved for “serious” drug abusers, meth addicts and others. When she gets out, “I’ll have no money, no support system, no job, no transportation.”

She never committed a violent offense.

Her story isn’t unusual, according to University of Kentucky College of Law professor Robert Lawson who largely wrote the state’s penal code in the 1970s. But since then, Lawson said, lawmakers have “gotten tough on crime” and added penalties and crimes, “jacking up misdemeanors to felonies” and passing harsh persistent felony offender — or three strike — laws.

The result is an explosion of people incarcerated for more and more crimes with more and more serious penalties.

“We’re not the land of the free anymore,” Lawson said. “We lock up more people than any country on earth.”

According to Bureau of Justice statistics, since 1970 the country’s crime rate has risen 3 percent while its population has grown by 28 percent, Lawson said. But the incarceration rate has gone up 600 percent.

In 1970, Kentucky incarcerated 2,838 in its state prisons and no state inmates in county jails. By 2000, the state incarcerated 15,444 inmates and seven years later, there are 22,489 state inmates — 7,966 in county jails.

“Most of these inmates are going into the jail system and there’s a very simple reason for that,” Lawson said. “They’ve got no space — there’s nowhere else to put them.”

Legislators stiffened sentencing requirements. They allowed prosecutors to charge defendants with multiple counts for essentially the same crime and added such enhancements as trafficking within 1,000 yards of a school — even if the offender is arrested while driving by the school or simply lives within 1,000 yards of the school.

Fewer prisoners awaiting trial are granted bail and pre-trial release; fewer are paroled; and the state passed a “truth in sentencing bill” which requires many inmates convicted of violent crimes to serve 85 percent of their sentences.

“It is next to impossible to describe all of the ways in which the General Assembly has contributed to the state’s inmate population by toughening provisions of the 1974 Penal Code,” Lawson writes in one of two studies he’s published on the problem. “It has created new crimes for which it has fixed unusually high penalties, has regularly toughened penalties for existing crimes, and on more occasions than can be mentioned has taken action to convert misdemeanors into felonies.”

Most of those moves were in response to public demands to control drug problems. But it’s not working.

“We’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I believe the problem is worse than it was when they started 25 years ago,” Lawson said of the get tough on drug crimes mentality. “We need to say, tell us when it’s going to get better, and if it doesn’t, let’s try something else.”

At the same time the public told lawmakers to get tough on crime, Kentucky was under a federal court order to cap its prison populations, so legislators cut a deal with counties — house our prisoners and we’ll pay you. Before they knew it, counties were dependent on state funding for housing state prisoners and began taking in more and more, overcrowding the jails.

The state reduced jail standards from 60 square feet per prisoner in the 1980s to 50 square feet in the 1990s. When jails continued to overflow, the state reduced it to 40 square feet.

“Put your arms out to your sides and turn around,” Lawson said. “That’s about 40 square feet.”

Walk into any county jail which houses state prisoners and you’re apt to find people sleeping on mats on the floors, sometimes as many as 16 prisoners locked up together all day with nothing to do but sleep or stare at a television suspended near the ceiling. They may get 30 minutes of exercise twice a week and perhaps a visit with family through a Plexiglas wall via a telephone for 15 minutes two times a week.

Lawson estimates 20 percent of inmates suffer from mental illness and perhaps 10 percent suffer serious mental illness. Young, non-violent offenders are housed in “pods” with serious criminals and sometimes victimized.

“There is no privacy for even the most basic of human acts and no defense to the humiliation that is inherent in these conditions,” Lawson said.

Nearly all of the state inmates housed in county jails are classified for community release, working outside the jail. But most of them do little more than pick up paper or mow grass along roadways or clean county buildings. There are no skills development or education programs to prepare inmates for their eventual release.

All Elizabeth Hunter wants is to get out of jail, get a job and regain custody of her children.

“My biggest challenge will be staying sober, finding employment,” Hunter said. “If I have to flip hamburgers, well, I’m no better than anybody else. And I did this to myself.”

Being placed in a county jail didn’t help.

RONNIE ELLIS writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com.